pink peppermints

And don’t forget to print the handy-dandy bridal shower checklist below! But before you do that… have you ever wondered where the tradition of a bridal shower came from? Its roots lie in old dowry practices. In western cultures if a poor woman was to be married and didn’t have a dowry, or if her father refused her her dowry because he didn’t approve of the man she would marry, her friends and female family members would give her gifts that would compensate for a dowry and she could then marry the man of her choice. The first instances of this happening were in Europe during the mid to late 1800s. An American parallel was the hope chest, and this later morphed into the more commonly practiced bridal shower that we know today. Interesting huh? I thought so!